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Monday, December 15, 2014

Bacterial Waste Makes You Feel Fuller For Longer

It may not sound very appetising, but an edible powder
made from waste excreted by bacteria in our guts may help people to
avoid gaining weight.

Stabilising a person's weight could have a
major health impact, says Gary Frost of Imperial College London,
because as people on Western diets grow older, they tend to put on
between 0.3 and 0.8 kilograms per year on average.

A fatty acid called propionate
is released when the bacteria in our gut digest fibre. Propionate makes
people feel full by activating cells in the large intestine that
produce the satiety hormones GLP-1 and PYY: these tell the brain that it's time to stop eating.

But to trigger a big enough dose of this
appetite-suppressing signal from gut bacteria alone, people would have
to eat extremely large amounts of fibre. To get around that, Frost and
his team made the molecule in a concentrated form called
inulin-propionate ester (IPE). "That gives you eight times the amount of
someone following a typical Western diet," he says.

Pass the IPE

To test its appetite-stemming properties, the
team gave powdered IPE, mixed in with fruit juice or a milkshake, to a
group of overweight volunteers every day for six months. A type of
ordinary fibre was given to another set of people, who acted as
controls.

Only
one of the 25 volunteers taking IPE put on more than 3 per cent of
their body weight over that time, compared with six of the 24 controls.
One reason for this might be that the IPE recipients ate around 9 per
cent less over the six months.

A second experiment on 20 healthy
volunteers also supported the effects of IPE. When the volunteers were
invited to eat as much as they liked from a buffet, they ate 14 per cent
less when given IPE than when given ordinary fibre. Levels of the
satiety hormones GLP-1 and PYY were higher in recipients of IPE.